ABSTRACT
The conventionally accepted notion of what constitutes ‘a film’ is the product of a specific period of the history of cinema, lasting roughly from 1915 to 1950. This period was characterised by the dominance of American interests. The intervention of broadcast TV, which had become a mass medium in both North America and Europe by the late 1950s, radically changed cinema’s methods of working. Cinema and broadcast TV have developed, over the last quarter century, both forms of coexistence and forms of divergence. TV has pioneered whole genres that had a primitive or fleeting existence in cinema like news and current affairs work. It has plundered cinema and literature for other genres, like melodrama. Within cinema, traditional mass entertainment forms have continued to operate, some with considerable financial success. Overall, however, cinema work has become more fragmentary, offering possibilities that broadcast TV cannot or will not provide. Sometimes, it is precisely because cinema has pioneered a means of representation that broadcast TV can then take it up. In this sense, cinema is rather more on the side of innovation than broadcast TV can be: this is one of the implications of cinema’s production of prototypes rather than TV’s industrial series production. Hence one of the most interesting relationships has grown up
between cinema and TV. TV uses cinema to provide it with new ideas, new material, and, above all, to take its risks for it.
